There seems to be an assumption in marketing that scale equals effectiveness. If we can reach more people, automate more touchpoints, and personalise at scale, we’ll need fewer people, and the pipeline will fill itself through automation.
The reality is that what many call ‘personalisation’ is little more than the merging of basic data (usually nothing more than first name and company name) and then some ‘AI slop’ body copy attempting to make the comms feel personal. We all get “personal outreach” emails, and, ironically, they don’t feel personalised in any way.
We all get “personal outreach” emails, and, ironically, they don’t feel personalised in any way.
Deploying the fishing net
The fishing net (mass marketing) is a perfectly legitimate tool. If you are selling a low-margin, relatively undifferentiated (commodity) product into a large market, scale is your advantage. You don’t need to understand every buyer in depth if you’re selling them a £5 greeting card. What you need is broad reach, efficient distribution, and conversion rates based on volume, where sending thousands of messages to generate a small percentage of sales makes commercial sense. The economics stack up because the model depends on throughput, and having potential customers drop through the net won’t cause you unnecessary reputational damage.
Email marketing platforms are built for this, and arguably, Mailchimp led the way when it was formed 25 years ago. With basic email marketing, data is easy to acquire, and campaigns are quick to prepare. For certain business models, this works exactly as intended. The difficulty arises when businesses that are not operating in a volume-driven, commodity market adopt the same approach.
A high-value B2B solution with a complex service offering and long lead times from awareness to sale cannot be marketed using the same techniques as a commodity consumer product. Adding a first name to an email does not make it personal, and simply referencing an industry does not demonstrate insight into their business. You know immediately when you are part of a mass marketing list rather than the focus of the sender’s attention.
Hunting with the harpoon
A harpoon is a great hunting tool, but it isn’t efficient in a crowded ocean of small fish. It’s a precision tool that only works if you know precisely what you are targeting and where it is likely to be found. It requires preparation, patience and intent. You certainly won’t land every strike, but when you do, the return is significant.
That’s the mindset shift at the heart of effective Account-Based Marketing (ABM). It is not simply “better segmentation” or “more personalised emails.” It is a fundamentally different operating model. Instead of treating a market as a pool of similar prospects, it treats priority accounts as just that, businesses that you really want to work with, and therefore demand attention. It starts with a clearly defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), layers in research about the specific organisations you are targeting and aligns marketing and sales around a small number of high-value opportunities.
How should you be fishing?
The right approach depends on your commercial model. If your growth depends on high-volume, low-margin transactions, then wide targeting supported by efficient marketing automation is a solid strategy. It would be counterproductive to invest disproportionate time and resources into individual accounts whose lifetime value (LTV) doesn’t justify it.
However, if your revenue model relies on fewer, larger, more strategic deals, then precision is not a luxury; it’s an absolute necessity. High-value opportunities demand a deeper understanding, stronger relevance and messaging built around real commercial priorities. They require coordination between marketing and sales, not just campaign deployment.
The choice between fishing with a net and a harpoon is not about preference; it’s about relevancy. Technology (augmented with “AI”) has made it easier than ever to reach thousands of people at the press of a button. It has not made it easier to be genuinely relevant. In markets where attention is scarce and trust is hard to win, relevancy beats reach every time.